


Undertow

by Arazsya



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Angst, Canon-Typical Disregard for Personal Safety, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 16:46:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11361489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Mick isn't expecting a rescue, but the idiot on the beach with the smile and the hair and the weird blanket has gone and rescued him anyway. He tells himself he doesn't need to return the favour.





	Undertow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [everyperfectsummer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyperfectsummer/gifts).



> Contribution to the DCCW Rarepair Swap on tumblr, for the prompt of an Atomwave selkie AU. I'm really sorry if you were hoping for fluff, this... isn't very fluffy. And, just sort of generally, sorry.

Mick hates the ocean.

At this point, he hates almost everything. He hates the sky, stretching from horizon to horizon, dark. He hates the remains of what had once been the boat, now just silhouettes of spars. He hates the shore – distant, too distant. But he hates the ocean in particular, hates the weight of it under him, the way it drags at him, the way it takes him nowhere.

Snart would have asked exactly why, then, he’d decided to try and rob a ship full of drug traffickers, but Snart isn’t there anymore, Snart isn’t anywhere, and that’s the thing that Mick hates most of all.

He still doesn’t hate the fire. He never could, no matter what it took from him. It’s beautiful, always has been, always will be. Even now that it’s taken the shape of his death, now that it’s going to kill him. It’ll be the fire or the water. Mick knows which he’d prefer, and he floats on his back and gazes at it until it burns most of the sight from his eyes. There must be oil, he half-thinks, oil leaking from the boat. Some stray spark had made it catch, and now the sea is on fire, light reflecting in the seething surface of the ocean until there are flames in every direction. The world is a prism, the image of the inferno its only purpose.

For a moment, there’s peace. Still and quiet and nothing.

And then there’s something sleek and dark in the water beside him, and he has just enough time to remember watching Shark Week with Snart before he’s dragged under. He flails out with both arms, trying to make whatever it is let go, but the sea steals the force from his blows. None of his strikes land, and the last thing he sees before he blacks out is the amber glow of flames turned distant by the darkness of the sea.

-

Mick wakes to the smell of a new fire, woodsmoke over the ocean’s own blend of seaweed and fish. He’s sprawled out, and presses his hands down, trying to push himself up, but what he’d thought was ground slips away from him. For a moment, it feels like he’s still caught in the pitching awful of the tide, and his eyes snap open. Sand. Dry sand. He’s alive. He’s ashore.

That gives him the peace of mind to lie still for a minute, watching the fire. It has the occasional flash of green in it, and Mick counts them and listens to the crackling. It’s a while before his brain registers the other noise.

Someone is _talking_.

Mick squints past the flames, trying to focus on the speaker, and goes to push himself up again, but the sand is still treacherous, and he thumps back down with enough force that he can predict the colour of the bruises.

“You should probably stay still a little longer,” the man says, but smiles at him anyway. Maybe he’s been doing it the whole time, and it just took Mick a while to recognise the expression, but now it hits him hard. Feels like a train passing through a ghost. It’s been so long since someone has smiled at him with nothing behind it – perhaps it never _had_ happened. It’s guileless. Genuine. And he finds himself doing what the man says.

The man goes back to talking, like nothing had happened. He talks, and talks even though his voice has gone flat, like he’s been using it non-stop for the past three hours after not speaking a word for five months. Mick lets his chatter fade into the background – it doesn’t seem to make any sense anyway – and studies him.

It takes him a minute to get past the smile and the big brown eyes, but once he does, he realises that the man is naked. There’s something dark wrapped around him, something that Mick thinks is a blanket at first, but the edges are ragged, somehow. And the mottled whites and greys that he can just make out on it aren’t uniform enough to have been printed on a machine. He doesn’t seem to have anything else. At all. No wallet, no phone, nothing. Not just nothing worth stealing, nothing _at all_.

And he keeps talking, filling up Mick’s silence, talking like he’s trying to win a medal for it. Maybe he hasn’t had anyone to talk to in a while, and all the words that he would have been saying to them are rushing out at once. Maybe he doesn’t think he’s supposed to let Mick sleep, in which case, he’s doing a lousy job, considering what Mick hopes had only been a brief spell of unconsciousness. But whatever the reason, he’s fairly certain that this man has said more words in the past two minutes than he has in his entire life.

Mick doesn’t see much wrong with interrupting him.

“Did you pull me out?” he demands, forcing himself into a sitting position. The sand tries to trick him back, spill out from under him again, but he’s damned if he’s having this conversation lying down.

“Yes?” The man’s smile drops away a little, unsettled by the accusation in Mick’s voice. “I saw the light. I couldn’t find any other–”

“Why?” There’s more rage in the question than Mick had intended. It boils underneath the word, and he expects the stranger to flinch away from it, or move cautiously and slowly away from him the way people do, sometimes. He doesn’t. Instead, there’s a flash of something in his face, some part of him trying to understand something that Mick doesn’t want understood. And then it’s gone, so fast that he almost decided he hadn’t seen it at all.

“You would have died,” the man says, like that’s enough of a reason to have saved him.

“And?” 

The man just stares at him, a slight frown on his face, as if he’s made an effort to smooth it out but it hasn’t quite worked. Whatever it was that Mick had thought he’d understood, it obviously wasn’t how to answer his question. And that probably means that he lives in some weird world where people do things out of the goodness of their hearts. The idiot had dragged him out of the sea, hauled him what had to have been some distance through the water, and he didn’t seem to expect anything in return.

Mick’s been rescued by a madman with no worldly possessions besides a ratty blanket and, admittedly, very nice hair, and now he _owes him_.

Somewhere, he’s sure Snart is laughing. At least now, he tells himself, the man’s stopped talking, so he can almost hear the noise his partner would have made. But the quiet lengthens around the fire’s gentle snapping, and now it doesn’t feel right, sits like a stone somewhere in Mick’s gut. A change in circumstances, he decides. That’s all it is. The man was talking for a long time, and now he isn’t, and it’s like the wind’s turned.

“It’ll be morning soon,” the man says, suddenly. He scrambles to his feet, wrapping his blanket even more tightly around him. Mick assumes he’s concerned about the way people will react to his nakedness – he needn’t worry, Mick’s seen people on beaches with far less on. “I had better go.”

He makes it a few shambling steps away from the fire before he stops, and looks back at Mick over his shoulder.

“I’m Ray,” he says, and waits.

“Mick,” Mick growls, and the man – _Ray_ – gives him that smile again.

“It was great to meet you, Mick,” he says, and he sounds like he means it, too. Like he enjoys saying Mick’s name, grins around it like it’s the best collection of noises he’s ever heard. It’s a distant cousin of a way Snart had said it once, when Mick had turned up to bust him out of some situation that hadn’t been part of the plan. But this time it’s not relief, it’s not born out of an averted expectation of violence. Ray seems genuinely thrilled about Mick’s existence.

Mick might have smiled himself at the absurdity of it, but his face has forgotten how to make the expression.

By the time he looks up again, Ray’s gone, and the sand falls to fill in his footprints. Mick’s alone with the fire again, and he figures that that’s the way things will always end.

-

Mick tries not to think about the encounter again. There’s not much reason to, he tells himself. He was alive, and unless Ray suddenly appeared and asked for a favour, that was all there was to it. He was alive. A part of him, he realised, hadn’t been expecting that outcome. Had stepped onto that boat knowing he probably wouldn’t come back. He hadn’t really known, hadn’t really thought about it at the time, but now he can’t seem to find anything to do with himself. He just hangs around on the same shore where he’d washed up, with nowhere else to go. Wanders the edge of the nearest town, steals enough to live on and tries not to think that he’s waiting for Snart to tell him what to do.

He does quite well at not letting Ray cross his mind again until he sees the seal. It happens when he’s wandering the quayside, looking for anyone with enough money for him to bother trying to take it. That’s what he should be doing. But his attention drifts away from the other people so completely that they might as well not have been there.

It’s the unexpected motion that attracts his eye, some self-preservation instinct that he hasn’t quite been able to switch off. He whirls, hand halfway to a weapon that he’s not been carrying, only to find himself almost threatening a seal.

The creature bobs at the water’s wind-rippled surface a few metres away, and regards Mick through large dark eyes. He knows that the fishermen feed the seals sometimes, but this one doesn’t seem interested in the boats at all.

Mick glares at it, and it waves a flipper at him, upsetting its balance badly enough to almost send it vanishing under the water. And, while he can probably count on one hand the number of seals he’s seen, Mick is fairly certain that they do _not_ wave. But freaks of nature aren’t his problem. He sets his back to it, and walks away.

The seal, apparently deciding that Mick is _its_ problem, just swims around until it’s in front of him again, ducks its head as if trying to make sure it has eye contact, and waves again.

“Go away,” Mick tells it, but it doesn’t. Just floats there. Waiting for something.

Mick goes away instead, turns his boots inland and keeps walking. And as he walks, he remembers bits and pieces of Ray’s inane chatter, drips of it stuttering into his head no matter how hard he tries to turn the faucet off. And what he remembers isn’t _normal_. Ray hadn’t talked about the weather or politics or even asked Mick what he’d been doing in the sea. Instead, he’d talked about how excited he was, and then he’d apologised for that. _I’ve never met anyone like you before_ , he’d said, and while Mick didn’t doubt that that was true, it wasn’t really the sort of thing that should have had Ray smiling like Mick had personally strung the stars out for him. _Maybe I’ll finally find out what happened to Sara_ , he’d said. There was no reason that meeting Mick should have made that any more likely. He didn’t know any Saras. Neither had Snart, that he’d been aware of. And Ray hadn’t even seemed to have an inkling of who Mick was, hadn’t been tracking him and waiting for an opportunity, hadn’t saved Mick because he needed something from him.

Ray had talked about how he’d never really walked before (how did people keep their ankles from going wrong?), never seen an electric light, never read a book, he’d asked what that was on Mick’s jacket and how did it work (and pointed at the zipper) and none of it, _none of it_ had been normal.

And then Mick remembers waiting to die. He remembers the dark and the cold, and something dragging him down into it. Dragging him by the collar. His hand drifts up to feel the material, and finds the punctures left in it. It would have to have been something sharp to have done that, something _very_ sharp. Not hands. There had been no brush of fingers against his neck, no marks on Ray that would match with hauling him that far. No sign of injury at all, unless Mick counted him occasionally rubbing at his neck and jaw.

There had been nothing _human_ about that grip.

He remembers floating, remembers that there had been no land at either horizon. Too far out for a swimmer. Too far out for any person without a boat who wasn’t looking to drown.

He remembers that when Ray had left him on that beach, he hadn’t walked towards the town, or towards anywhere that he might have been conceivably living.

He’d walked back towards the sea.

-

The remains of the fire that Ray built are still there, even though it’s been days. Maybe the tide doesn’t reach this high, Mick thinks, as he settles beside them, not entirely sure how he’d ended up there. He had walked away from the water, and hadn’t realised that he must have turned until his boots had hit the sand.

It’s early evening, and the ocean is turning purple, stained by the creeping dark and the spread of colour across the sky. Mick watches the waves as they turn gently at the edge of the sand. They hadn’t been like that before, he thinks. Before, they had roared. He stares at them, trying to remember the tone of it, until he sees something else. A shape, silhouetted against the reflection of the sky, stumbling from the surf.

It’s Ray, with his blanket – his _skin_ , Mick realises, as a flipper shifts slightly in the breeze – still wrapped around him. And his smile when he sees Mick is almost brighter than it had been before. Or perhaps not, perhaps Mick just can’t remember properly the way it was before, in the same way that his memory can’t properly capture the way a fire dances, the way that seeing the flames again is always like seeing them for the first time.

“Hey, Mick,” he says, sitting gingerly down beside him, still unsteady on his feet. Mick shifts away a little, and covers it by reaching into his bag.

“Haircut,” he says, but he doesn’t see how Ray reacts to it, burying his attention in his search. Missing it comes with the sort of satisfaction that feels like someone’s bored a hole in his intestines. “I brought some clothes.” He hadn’t intentionally, just carried a change with him in case he needed it, and they’re nothing much. The shirt has oil stains down it.

Ray thanks him anyway, and Mick looks away as he pulls them on. When he turns back, Ray’s sitting again, holding his skin in his arms as if he’s not entirely sure what to do with it if he’s not wearing it. Mick’s clothes seem to fit him all right, but the neck of the shirt shows far more skin with the buttons undone than it does on Mick. He finds himself staring at Ray’s left collarbone, which makes no sense, Snart would have said, considering that he’d been almost entirely naked a minute ago.

Despite the logic that talks to him in his late partner’s voice, it takes him a while to notice that Ray’s talking again, thanking him yet again for the clothes and then wandering back away into how excited he is. How much there is to explore, how he’s always wanted to see what the land was like, how much of it there was. It’s like he’s trying to learn as much as he can in as short a space of time as possible, because there is always _so much more_.

Something in Mick’s chest shifts uncomfortably, and he tries to tune the chatter out as best he can, convince himself that it really isn’t his problem that Ray won’t be smiling like that for much longer if he dips so much as a toe into Mick’s world. Mick’s world would chew him up and spit him out a wreck, even if all he had been was some naive idiot who was worth more money than he realised.

Mick had seen a werewolf, once. Snart had been trying to work out a deal for some piece of art with a fancy name, and Mick had heard something. A noise that was to his ears like someone firing a Taser. Snart had heard it too, tipped his head at Mick, and Mick had gone to make sure that they weren’t about to be ambushed.

He’d found the cage between a stack of identical paintings and an old armchair covered in dust sheets. At first, he hadn’t realised there was anything inside it, until the creature had cowered away at his approach and the bars had sparked where its back had pressed into them. All it had had to offer the rising moon had been one golden eye, the other swollen closed, and a mouth full of teeth so twisted they were embedded in its lips.

He’d walked back to Snart, and never mentioned it. A part of him wishes he had. Now, he doesn’t have the words to explain it to Ray, to explain what the world does to people like him. It’s bad enough that he has that stupid, optimistic outlook, that he hasn’t even noticed that Mick’s the sort of person who deserves proximity alerts, even though he’s never tried to hide it, that he wants to believe the best of people. And he just has to be a selkie, too. Has to be like the werewolf, something half of the world will refuse to believe exists (so, of course, doesn’t need its protection), while the other half swallows him whole.

Mick doesn’t care, he decides. It doesn’t matter to him if this idiot refuses to learn the order of the new world he’s ended up in and gets himself killed. Except it does, because, idiot that he is, he’d saved Mick’s life, and that was a debt that needed paying.

He wishes he had the words and the will to tell Ray to get back in the sea and swim until land is something that none of the fish have even seen. But he doesn’t. Can’t.

It shouldn’t be bothering him the way it is. He’s met Ray all of three times, and as much as it’s nice to have someone there after so long alone, Ray isn’t Snart and he never will be. He talks too much and knows too little.

Mick’s not sure how long they sit there together. He finds himself coming up with creative ways to shut Ray up, hurriedly dismissing them one by one, and his eyes stray back to Ray’s collarbone more times than he’d like. But he’s noticed plenty of things were pretty before and it’s never stopped him from leaving them behind to whatever’s going to end them.

Dawn comes before either of them move. Ray shifts, almost uneasy again, as the sun starts to climb, and Mick’s ears bring the silence back into focus.

“I suppose you have somewhere to be,” Ray says, hesitantly. Mick doesn’t, but he has a feeling that if he says so, Ray will stay, and he might find himself adopting another stray, just like he had when he’d saved Snart in juvie. So he says nothing as Ray scrambles to his feet, wobbles for a second like he’s forgotten how to use them, and then manages a step away. Then he stops, and looks back at Mick.

“Nearest town’s that way,” Mick says, unwilling to hear any question from Ray that’s not about where he’s supposed to go, and gestures. It’s not much of a town, some old port that had been slowly metamorphosing into a tourist attraction, but wasn’t yet popular enough for the beach to be a resort. It’s small, not too much trouble for Ray to be wandering into, not since Mick had got on a boat with what had seemed to be the entirety of the local drug trade.

Ray nods, but he keeps watching Mick.

“You didn’t have to do this,” he says, when Mick doesn’t move. “You didn’t owe me anything. Thank you.”

Mick doesn’t reply, and Ray walks away again. Mick stays by the sea a while longer, and knows that no one is ever going to smile at him like that, _look at him like that_ , ever again.

-

Mick leaves the coast, after that. Doesn’t _go_ anywhere, not really. He’s just drifting. Spends a little time in Starling City, a little more in Hub City. Inevitably ends up back in Central City, but not through any great desire to be there. Just because it’s as good or as bad a place to be as any. He tries to get back on the horse, earns a few of his smaller scores. Nothing big, never anything big, always burns more than Snart would’ve let him and doesn’t know whether it’s still just fire for the sake of fire.

Eventually, bored of his minor heists, he starts casing the Central City Museum. It’s the sort of task that he should have given to a partner, someone with a face that hasn’t yet been shown on the news as a warning, but none of the partners he’s tried since Snart’s death have lasted very long. The last one had tried to take Mick’s share of their spoils with him on his way out, and Mick had decided that it was better to work alone. So he blends into the crowd as much as he’s ever been able to, lets the mass of people guide him slowly through the exhibits, half-hopes that no one will recognise him and half hopes that he gets to see whether security can take him down.

No one challenges him, and he keeps wandering. There are a few bits of gold that attract his attention, covered in hieroglyphics and probably worth more to a collector as they were than to anyone else as the metal. The odd jewel, surrounded by more pottery than anyone could ever want. A few scraps of aged paper that didn’t look that important to Mick, but that the tour groups seem to stop at for longer than warranted.

It doesn’t feel right, doing it like this. Snart would have had a target, an objective, an escape route, and a way of disabling the security systems before he had even set foot in the museum.

“Mick!”

He reaches for a gun he’s not carrying, already trying to match the voice up with someone from his long list of enemies before he’s finished turning.

It’s only Ray, waving at him from the other end of one of the cases – this one containing a large upright sarcophagus. Mick hates the way that they stand them on their ends, like they’re just waiting for people to walk into them, so that they can close and once again become the coffins they had been before.

He decides that the reason he strides over there, grips Ray by the elbow, and turns him away from the gaping sarcophagus, all in under ten seconds, is that people are turning to look, their attention caught by Ray’s call.

“Haircut,” he says. Ray smiles, and even in the dim light of the Ancient Egypt gallery, it’s like the sun coming out. Damn him. “What are you doing here?”

“I come here every day,” Ray says, and he’s trying to slow down as Mick shoves him on, peering at the exhibits. “For about a month. I thought I should learn things. What about you?”

“Thought I might rob the place,” Mick growls, because Ray’s looking at him like he’s the one who invented puppies, and everything would be so much simpler if he didn’t. But the expression on Ray’s face doesn’t flicker, and Mick almost stops short at the realisation that everything he’d been thinking about Ray hadn’t been quite right. He’s an idiot, yes, but the things that Mick believes make him that – the optimism, the trust – they’re a choice. Not something that he just didn’t know any better than to do. Ray had looked at Mick, seen everything that Mick was, and he’d trusted him anyway.

“Would you mind leaving ancient civilisations intact for a while?” Ray asks, and he’s _teasing_. “I’ve not finished here yet. Shouldn’t take me too long.”

Mick quickens their pace, strides out of ancient civilisations and manages to angle it so that Ray’s between him and the security cameras. Not that it matters. He’s already decided, somewhere in his brain, that there is no way he’s going to rob the place if there’s even the slightest possibility that Ray will get caught up in the mess he leaves behind.

“I’ve been meaning to find you, actually,” Ray goes on, keeping up with him with no real trouble. “I wanted to thank you for lending me your clothes.”

“You would’ve found some eventually,” Mick mutters. It looks like Ray has by now – the jacket and jeans he’s wearing are new. He’s still wearing Mick’s old shirt, though it’s cleaner now, and he’s done up the buttons. Mick feels a slight twinge at that, and then sweeps the thought so far under the rug that he’s worried for a second it’ll pop out the other side. “And keep them. Makes us even.” He certainly doesn’t want them back, doesn’t want to be able to work out exactly what Ray smells like.

“Really, it looks like I wouldn’t have got very far with just my sealskin. Let me buy you a drink.”

 _Maybe you don’t want to talk about your sealskin in public_ , Mick thought, but he held his jaw shut. Ray seemed to be doing all right for himself – he’d earned enough money to dress, and he wasn’t dead or in a cage. He hadn’t ended up like the werewolf. Maybe what he’d found hadn’t been Mick’s world, had been a different one that was laid over the top, one where he could thrive.

“A drink? Now you’re talking,” he says, because needing a drink has become something of a permanent state of being. And a few beers might go some way to quieting the voices in his head, the ones telling him that just because Ray was doing all right now didn’t mean that he’d be doing all right later, that he still needed to be _warned_ , that he needed someone to explain what would happen if anyone, _anyone_ found out he could be so easily bound. And the other voices, too, the ones demanding to know why Mick _shouldn’t_ spend some time with someone who had probably guessed the exact number of years Mick had spent in Iron Heights and _still_ looked at him like he’d saved their life.

He isn’t sure which ones he wants gone more.

It turns out that Ray’s idea of what _a drink_ was doesn’t exactly match up with Mick’s, or perhaps no one had explained the correct vocabulary choices, and they finish up in a coffee shop. Mick feels out of place in a chair more brightly coloured than the jar of gummy bears at the counter, like he’s tried to fit into a child’s playhouse, but he drinks the coffee anyway, and Ray talks.

“I did look for you by the sea,” Ray tells him, both his hands wrapped around a mug that only needed one. “But you weren’t there.”

“I had to go,” Mick says, but he can’t explain why. He’s not entirely sure of it himself, but he’d turned his feet away from that beach every time he’d found himself approaching it again. He’d stayed in and detached himself from the world, and then he’d just left. Hadn’t wanted that place on his skin anymore. “I hate the ocean.”

“So I came here,” Ray continues, after there’s been more than enough silence for Mick to have explained properly. “I’ve got a job in an electrical goods store, all the tech is really fascinating – back in the sea we had no idea how much you’d made – but I think I can make some improvements, I just need to make sure I’ve understood the theory correctly. I’ve been going to lectures, too, physics mostly but a few other things sometimes. I had no idea there’s be so much to learn up here, or I would’ve come up sooner, Anna and I always said that we would but then–” He stops himself, so hard that Mick thinks he’s bitten through his tongue for a second, and there’s that look on his face again, the one he’d had before when he’d been trying to understand. Then it’s gone again, and he’s properly talking to Mick again. “The others have always gone on about how dangerous it was, all these old folktales about how anyone who goes on shore ends up with their skin stolen. They think it’s what happened to Sara, I’ve been looking for her, too, but I’ve not been able to find her yet.”

“You got yours somewhere safe?” Mick prompts, and nearly bites through his own tongue.

“What? Yes,” Ray says, and Mick hopes that it’s the concern he hadn’t meant to let out that’s confused him, and not the idea that he might be vulnerable. “But from what I’ve been able to tell, most people on land don’t think selkies are real anyway. Selkies or anything else.”

“Mostly, no,” Mick says. And that, along with their scarcity, is what makes the trade in mythical creatures so profitable. _This one’s probably worth quite a bit to the right person_ , says a voice in his head that sounds a bit like Snart. Not Snart. Snart wouldn’t have touched that particular area of the black market with a ten-foot barge pole, even before his sister got involved with that seer, so neither would Mick. It’s just some warning system, trying to tell him not to get too close, that he’d failed to protect Snart, and he’d fail Ray too. Ray looked like the sort of idiot who’d end up dying for him. Snart hadn’t, but it was exactly what he’d done anyway.

“What about you?” Ray asks, all genuine interest. “Did you think we were real?”

Mick shrugs. He hadn’t cared. It had never made much difference to him either way. He’d certainly never thought about selkies beyond a basic knowledge of what they were.

Ray lapses into quiet, but it’s not an uncomfortable one. Just the kind where everyone had said what they’d needed to for the moment, so there was little left to do but sit in companionable silence. It doesn’t last. He shoots Mick a smile that’s almost shy, digs a notebook out of his jacket pocket, flips through it a bit, then turns it around to show Mick some complicated design or other. His handwriting’s better than Mick would’ve expected for someone who’d spent most of their life as a seal, but he still can’t really make heads or tails of it. All he can really say is that it’s not recognisably a weapon.

“I’ve been drawing up some designs,” Ray says, looking up at Mick as if for approval. Mick squints at the diagram, but the most he can get out of it is still that one of the components looks a bit like a duck. “I was thinking of selling them or looking for an investor or something. I’ve got a meeting with this guy on Monday, I’m still surprised he agreed to it, but everyone seems to think he’s the best.”

Mick grunts, and Ray continues to show him things. And while he might not be interested in whatever the man’s inventing in his spare time, Ray is enthusiastic, and Mick isn’t adverse to that. To the way that he angles his head down towards the notebook, then flicks his eyes up to look at Mick, the focus in his expression slipping into something closer to one of his smiles every time he does so. Not quite the grins that he’d got when they’d first met on the beach, smaller expressions that told him Ray was happy he was there.

“Why do you smile so much, Haircut?”

The question sits in the air for a second before Mick realises that he asked it. Ray’s paused in the middle of a new diagram that looks like it might have met a toaster once, blinking.

“I don’t?” he says.

“You do,” Mick tells him, while wishing that he could glue his mouth closed because now that he’s drawn attention to it, Ray might stop. And the coffee’s not hot enough to burn him silent any longer. “You’ve been smiling this whole time. I don’t understand how your face isn’t hurting.”

“Maybe it’s just you,” Ray says, and then seems to realise what the words that just came out of his mouth mean. His eyes go off sideways, though his attention is still painfully clearly on Mick.

“What’s that thing do?” Mick asks, and points at an indistinct point on the notebook page. Ray launches gratefully into an explanation, and everything’s almost back the way it was before.

It looks, a few times, as if Ray’s going to ask him what _he_ has been up to since they last met, but whenever it looks like a particularly imminent danger, Mick gives him a question about his tinkering to answer. He’s fairly sure that Ray doesn’t actually want to know the specifics of what he does, especially considering that the one really notable thing Mick had done since he’d left the coast was kill the man who’d tried to double-cross him, the last of his prospective new partners. He’s probably guessed that it’ll be something along those lines, always allows himself to be led onto a new topic.

For a moment, Mick wants to tell him anyway. It’s not something that he’s ashamed of – it happens, sometimes. But it might put just a little bit of waver in the believing-the-best-in-Mick thing that Ray has going on. Then maybe he wouldn’t be around distracting Mick with his caring about him and the stupid goddamn smile that he didn’t even know he was doing. Mick is, after all, _supposed_ to be robbing a museum. But he can’t.

So they sit there, and somehow both end up with several refills. Ray eventually stops talking so much, but even then he just seems happy to share in Mick’s silence. Or, he does, until they’re getting towards saying their goodbyes, and Mick suggests that he return the favour sometime, make it even. His face must have done something to betray him, to tell Ray that he knew they were never going to be even. Ray had saved him from drowning, he’d given him a few second-hand clothes and told him where town was. No amount of drinks would _ever_ make that even.

Ray frowns, looks genuinely troubled, and reaches a hand across the table towards Mick’s. It stops halfway across, uncertain how to go the rest of the distance.

“I told you before,” he says. “You really don’t owe me anything. At all.”

“You saved my life,” Mick retorts, and keeps his limbs to himself. “Sounds like something.”

Ray glances down at his hand, stuck between continents, and when he speaks again, it’s quieter, as if he almost doesn’t want Mick to hear it.

“And we’re even,” he says. “I pulled you out of the sea, and you might as well have pulled me out, too. I’ve been wanting to come on land for _years_ , and then after Anna died I thought I never would. And you meant that I had to. If I hadn’t found you, I probably would have stayed there forever. And this, for me – this has been everything. If anything, I still owe you.”

“So I don’t have to pay for coffee?”

Ray smiles again. Mick has no idea where he gets them all from. Maybe he’s been saving up, like his words when Mick had first met him. Seals can’t talk and they can’t smile either, Mick doesn’t think.

“You don’t have to pay for coffee,” he agrees. Part of Mick still feels as if he should, but Ray had sounded like he really believed what he was saying. They were even. And if Ray’s going to feel some sort of misguided loyalty to him for the rest of his life anyway, Snart would haunt him forever if he didn’t at the very least get a few drinks out of it.

“Next time we’re going to a bar,” Mick announces, and he’s wondering what Ray’s like drunk before the sentence is even out. Probably the sort that does karaoke. Wonderful.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Ray says, and Mick is so sure that he means it. But when he goes back to the museum a week later, to try and set a date and time, Ray’s not there. He’s not there the next day, either, or the one after that. He’s just gone.

-

Mick hopes that, whatever world Ray’s ended up in, it’s not the one that he’d hauled Mick back to. He stays in Central City, but he never goes near the museum again. It’s not about what he’s stealing anymore. It’s about the act of the theft itself, and leaving the fire behind him. About watching it burn. Maybe, for Mick, it always had been, and Snart had been the only thing giving his violence form.

He takes money and baubles and all the things which he needs to survive. He doesn’t need much, but he takes more anyway. The voice in his head that sounds like Snart says that he’s compensating, because he knows he needs something he can’t steal, and whenever he hears it, something burns.

He knows that the CCPD think he’s a rabid dog that needs putting down, knows that everyone else, even the people like him, probably think the same. He’s not sure they’re wrong, but at least he never has to look for a seat in a bar.

Somehow, it’s easier to see nothing when it’s through the bottom of a bottle. The problem is, he needs there to be _something_ , and he can’t fill the space. It doesn’t matter how often he hears Snart’s voice, knows exactly what he’d say, what he’d do, Snart is gone and Mick isn’t and it’s impossible to bring him back. In Mick’s mind, that does enough to explain why he’d tried to rob some drug traffickers in the middle of the ocean, and now, why he’s planning to rob Eobard Thawne.

Thawne is the papers’ golden boy. They call him a tech billionaire, talk about how he got where he was because of how smart he was, because of the things he builds and theorises about. They wail over his massive donations to charities and print pictures of him waving.

Some people, Mick’s sort of people, know a bit more about him. That he’s the smartest person in any given room – which the papers would agree with. They also know that the odds are good he’d also be the meanest person in that room, the wolf who’d been able to trick the sheep into voting for him, the dangerous kind of man who had money and sense in exactly equal amounts.

They all resented him, in their own way, but none of them had ever been smart enough or stupid enough to try and rob him. It was the sort of heist that Snart had plotted when he got bored but never really attempted. There was something personal there, something about an emerald that Thawne owned but loaned to museums sometimes, but Snart had never liked to talk about it.

People said that anyone who crossed Thawne got hunted down and cut into very small pieces, first emotionally and then physically, and Snart had always had his sister to think about. Mick doesn’t have anyone left.

Thawne lives, or works, or both ( _his work is his life!_ the papers and magazine articles proclaim), in a place down on the waterfront, with the kind of view that a person pays the price of a black market kidney for. Mick spends more time casing the place than he usually would, but he’s not so far gone that he doesn’t remember the way that the people in his bars flinch when Thawne’s mentioned on the television, the way the channel is abruptly changed.

It’s more of a compound than a workplace or a home. Mick lurks on the fringes, and learns the security guards’ shifts and the faces of the employees. He watches Thawne’s website for job openings, steals a uniform and falsifies an ID, and by the time the new recruits with their unfamiliar faces are on their way in, so is he.

It’s easier than he would have expected, but he tells himself that Thawne’s security is calibrated for people like Snart, smart people who get bored and go mad trying to solve unsolvable puzzles. Mick isn’t like that. Mick’s a blunt instrument. They probably hadn’t expected anyone as straightforward as him to try anything.

It’s supposed to be a quick job. Go in as a newbie, find the emerald, set off the fire alarms and vanish outside along with everyone else. And it all goes according to plan, for the first ten minutes or so. He manages to split away from the group of other security guards without incident, and starts down the route that he’d plotted enough on the building’s schematics to know it backwards. It takes him past a doorway into one of the main labs, and that’s when he sees Ray again.

Mick almost doesn’t recognise him at first. He’s wearing a uniform, like the rest of the scientists, and if it hadn’t been for the sound of his voice, quietly asking someone where they’ve put something with more syllables than Mick cares to count, he would have walked on by. He should have kept going anyway, but it’s like his feet have grown roots.

His first thought is that Ray has no idea who he’s working for. The second is that under no circumstances is Ray to find out who he’s working for. The third is a moment of wordless confusion, because Mick knew the faces of every employee here, and Ray had never been one of them.

Footsteps start down the hall towards him, and Mick slips into the lab and ducks out of sight behind a row of filing cabinets. He starts waiting, and tells himself that it’s because if he doesn’t wait for Ray to leave, he risks the man seeing him and greeting him in the same friendly way that he always did, blowing his cover and landing them both in trouble.

But Ray doesn’t leave. All the others do, one by one. None of them go together. They barely talk to one another unless it’s after equipment. Barely _look_ at one another. The maintenance staff leave, and still Ray doesn’t. He doesn’t seem to be doing work any longer, either. He just stares, not even at whatever it was that he was supposed to be doing, and Mick realises, slowly, that Ray isn’t going to leave. That Ray never leaves, and that’s why he hadn’t seen him as he had the others. That Ray probably knows _exactly_ who he’s working for.

Thawne comes in three minutes and sixteen seconds after the last cleaner has left. Mick hates him on sight. He’s wearing an immaculate suit and a smile that turns Mick’s stomach. The expression does reach his eyes, but they somehow still look as if they’ve been carved from jagged stone.

Ray doesn’t smile at Thawne. Mick notices that before any of the rest of it. When Ray had talked to him on the beach, he’d smiled at Mick like it was easier than breathing, and now his face is empty of it. Like it’s never even met the expression.

This man in the uniform looks nothing like the person who’d dragged Mick out of the sea just for the sake of saving him. He’s dulled. Mick doesn’t like it. _Hates_ it. Hates the way the set of Ray’s shoulders is wrong, the way he wasn’t focussing on his work like he had with his notebook, the way he doesn’t look at Thawne but is clearly still utterly aware of the man’s exact position.

It looks like Thawne doesn’t like it either. He takes a step closer to Ray, and Ray flinches back, the expression on his face raw. Thawne says something, and it’s like the words rip his jaw sideways on their way out. It’s a threat. Mick knows one when he sees one, even if he can’t hear it.

The next time Thawne moves, Ray doesn’t. Mick stops watching. Instead, he settles behind the filing cabinets so he’s a little more hidden, and wonders what Thawne would look like if he were on fire. Exactly what pitch his screaming would reach. What precise shade his flesh would take as it bubbled.

This changes things, Mick decides. The emerald can wait. Forever, if it needs to. He’s going to get Ray out, and if he has the opportunity, he’s going to end Thawne.

He waits behind the cabinets until he feels his legs starting to cramp, and then he waits longer. Keeps waiting, until Thawne strides out past him, humming something, and Ray lets out a long breath.

Mick straightens, and steps more fully into the light and the view of the security cameras. It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. He’s still dressed as a guard. He has some time. Ray is facing away from him, towards the window, and seems to be trying to control a shake in his hands. He tenses again at the sound of Mick’s footsteps, and Mick stops.

“Haircut?” he says.

Ray turns, slowly, like he thinks that Mick won’t be there when he finally looks, and he doesn’t want to break the illusion. But Mick doesn’t vanish. He stands there, solid, and waits.

“Mick?” he says, and smiles, or tries to. His face is too tired for it to come through properly. “What are you doing here?”

“I was going to rob the place,” Mick tells him, and he can’t stop himself from baring his teeth with the words. “Maybe burn it down. With Thawne inside.”

Ray takes a moment to digest the information, and nothing crosses his face. Maybe he’s got good at hiding his emotions. Maybe he just isn’t having any.

“Anything I can do to help?” he asks, eventually.

“I was thinking I might steal you,” Mick offers, and he likes the sound of it. Likes the concept, too. Pictures himself stealing Ray away from this world that he should have warned him about, in such a way that the guilt won’t feel like a steel band around his windpipe forever. He tells himself that there’s nothing he could have done against Thawne’s will, no warning that could have prepared Ray for it, but though it’s technically true, it sits in his head like a lie.

“Oh. I’m not sure I can do anything to help with that.” There’s no change in the timbre of Ray’s words, and it makes Mick’s skin crawl.

“Exit’s that way,” Mick says, pointing back over his shoulder. “You can walk out.”

Ray shifts his stare in the direction that he indicated, before he drags it back towards Mick. “I can’t. He took my skin. You know how it works. He stole my skin, and now I’m bound to him, can’t leave him or work against him or say – or anything. It’s...” He breathes, with more force than he needs to, and Mick wonders if he’s trying to find a way of saying _magic_ without using that particular word. “It’s lore,” he finishes.

 _Law_ , Mick hears. For Ray’s kind, he supposes, they might as well be the same thing.

“Then I’ll steal it back,” Mick says, and Ray just looks at him blankly. “I’m a criminal,” he points out. “A thief. I don’t follow the rules.” And people have been trapped by more mundane things than whatever weird mystical stuff Ray’s dealing with, and the solution’s been more complicated. All he has to do is get the skin. “Tell me what happened.”

“You remember I told you I was meeting with a possible investor?” Ray shakes his head as he talks, like his body doesn’t agree that anything being suggested is possible. “Well, that was Thawne. I thought the meeting went OK, but then he was waiting for me when I got home, said he’d done a little research on me before and that he was very interested in the way I’d only just started existing a few months ago. And then he told me he wanted me to come and work for him here, I said no, and he said that I didn’t really have a choice. And I could _feel_ it.”

Mick can picture it. Thawne would have been smirking the whole time, not a single speck of dust on his suit.

“What happens if it’s destroyed? Does that get you out?”

Ray’s frown deepens, and he’s not really looking at Mick any longer.

“I don’t know,” he says. “No one does. If anyone ever had it happen, they’ve never been able to come back to the sea and tell us about it. No one’s ever wanted to test it out for themselves. I’ve heard that it’ll free you and I’ve heard that it’ll kill you.”

Not an option, then.

“You know where he keeps it?”

“I can’t.”

Mick opens his mouth to ask what that means, but he can see it. He can see it in the way Ray’s entire body has tensed up, the ugly combination of anger and frustration and helplessness on his face. Ray can’t tell him where it is, because that constitutes working against Thawne. He can’t go and get it himself, because so does that. And of course Thawne would have told him where it was, he would have wanted Ray to know exactly, to know that it was close but that he couldn’t get to it.

That didn’t matter. He’d search the whole house if he needed to.

“Mick, I don’t want you to die.” Ray looks so wretched as he says it that Mick considers picking him up and seeing whether the rules are capable of keeping Ray from being kidnapped.

“I don’t want you to die either, Haircut,” he growls. “You said you felt it when Thawne had the skin. Will you feel it if I get it?”

“I think so,” Ray says, and Mick tries to ignore the uncertainty of it.

“Then the moment you feel that, you go. I’ll see you on the beach.” Mick started to move away, back towards the door. He’ll try Thawne’s office first, he decides. That seems as likely a place as any.

“I’m not leaving you,” Ray snaps, and it’s the strongest that Mick’s heard him sound in the whole conversation.

“Last guy who told me that died,” Mick retorts, and quickens his pace. If Ray can’t help him against Thawne, he’s a hindrance and he’s better off out of the way. “Don’t make me have to come back in here for you.”

He’s out the door almost before he’s finished talking. Ray calls after him, sounds desperate. Mick doesn’t look back.

-

Thawne isn’t in his office, and Mick does his best to swallow his disappointment. He’d wanted the satisfaction of breaking a few bones. Kicking the door in hadn’t been nearly enough. But there’ll be time enough to hunt Thawne down when all this is done, he decides.

The room is near-empty, a temple to rich man’s minimalism. One wall is nothing but window, and in daylight there would have been quite a view. But the glass is tinted now, and he can’t see the stars. There are whiteboards opposite, covered in writing that makes no sense to Mick, and a long, sleek desk, a line of model aircrafts along the edge.

He starts there, and works his way along. Tapping, looking for a safe, for anything that a man like Thawne might keep his valuables in. There’s nothing. The desk is just a desk, and the drawers, when opened, reveal nothing but stationary. No false bottoms, just board pens and rubbers. The walls are the same, uniform and uninteresting, and Mick curses.

“Looking for this?”

Mick’s head jerks around at the sound of the voice, and Thawne is standing there in the doorway, holding Ray’s skin in one hand and a lighter in the other. He meets Mick’s eyes, and moves the lighter a little closer, and the moving flame gives his smile strange, predatory shadows.

Mick takes a step closer, and Thawne raises his eyebrows as if he’s expecting to hear a very good punchline.

“I’ve been wondering how long it would take for you to show yourself ever since you first started staking out my premises,” Thawne says, almost idly, like he’s bored by the whole thing. His eyes tell a different story, sparking with malice. “It’s quite unusual to have a thief here, and I was finding your progress rather interesting. I have to admit, I was a little surprised that the silent alarm went off for my office instead of for my collection, but I just watched your lovely conversation with Raymond on the CCTV. I didn’t think you were the sentimental type, Mr Rory. Or is it just one stray at a time with you?”

Mick swallows a reaction, and instead makes the distance between him and Thawne that little bit smaller.

“Careful,” Thawne says, and his voice is light, like there’s laughter behind it that he’s not quite letting out. “Wouldn’t want me to slip.” He passes the flame a little closer to the skin, and Mick freezes. “Do you know what happens if I destroy this?”

Mick says nothing. Thawne has enough of an advantage as it is.

“Not feeling talkative anymore? Or is Raymond just _special_?” Thawne’s smirk is sharp at the end of the question. “I can tell you think it’ll kill him. But it won’t. All it means is that he’s stuck with me forever. Though I understand destroying the skin is rather painful for them. You’re probably wondering why I haven’t done it already, but I just find it so much more _fun_ when he knows it’s here.”

“What happens if you burn it, and then I kill you?” Mick takes another step closer, and Thawne’s smirk breaks into a genuine smile. It’s the one that Mick’s seen photographs of in magazines, the one he’s supposed to get when he’s making a new discovery.

“I have to admit, I don’t know,” he says. “So let’s say it’s fifty-fifty. Either it frees him or he dies with me. How do you feel about those odds?”

Mick is silent. He knows how he feels about those odds. They’re as unacceptable as the ones Ray had presented for what burning the skin would do. Thawne knows that, and he thinks all Mick can do is stand there, wait for Thawne to finish talking, surrender, and hope Thawne lets him leave. Leave Ray here and walk away, get himself killed somewhere else.

That’s not acceptable either.

“What do you say, Mick?” Thawne asks, says Mick’s name like it’s a word that’s beneath him, and his jaw pulls sideways again. The gesture of a man who thinks he’s holding all the aces. “Are you ready to lose Raymond just like you lost, what was his name? Leonard? Did you tell Raymond about him? About how he died for you? I’d guess not, if he still wants to be around you. You don’t have the best track record with partners, do you? Maybe he’s better off here with me, maybe Leonard would’ve been better off if you–”

Mick crosses the metres between him and Thawne, as quickly as he can, but Thawne is fast. Faster than him. If Mick had been reaching for the skin or for Thawne himself, he would’ve lost. But Mick goes for the lighter. His hand closes over it before it can touch the skin, and there’s a momentary stab of heat into his palm before the lack of oxygen puts the flame out, and then it’s only pain. His other hand is a fist, and it hits Thawne full in the face, hard enough that Mick thinks he feels bone, teeth break. The skin of his knuckles is cracked, and Thawne is on the ground, still startled.

Mick gently lifts the skin away from Thawne’s grasping fingers, and turns, ready to leave Thawne to a house that he still intends to burn down.

“He’ll leave you,” Thawne snarls, blood spraying from between his lips with the words.

Mick stops.

“He’ll go back to the sea,” Thawne continues, his voice gaining strength. He can tell he has an audience. Or maybe he’s just spat out all of the jagged pieces of his broken teeth. “He’ll leave you. You give him that, and you’ll never see him again.”

Mick turns back towards him, slowly. Thawne is still on the ground, but he’s got that look on his face again. Smartest man in any given room.

“It’s what they do,” he goes on, starting to stand up again, slowly, like Mick’s an animal he knows not to startle. “His kind. They get their skins back after they’ve been stolen, and they vanish into the ocean and they never come back. It’s lore.”

The voice in Mick’s head that sounds like Snart tells him to go, not to listen, but Thawne’s words are in there too, like spiders.

“If you keep that,” Thawne tells him. “He’ll stay with you. You don’t want to be alone again, do you? And you can keep him safe. Show him everything he was so excited to see. And he likes you, enjoys spending time with you. Would it really be so bad for you to get what you want, too?”

Thawne’s manipulating him. Mick knows it, would have had to have been a fool not to. He thinks that what Mick wants will eventually lead to him getting what he wants. And he wants the skin kept in play, so that it’s possible for him to take it back.

“All you have to do,” Thawne says. “Is keep the skin. And then he can’t ever go. You’ll never be alone again. He doesn’t want to go back to the sea.”

Mick hits him again. And again. And again. Leaves him lying on his back, bleeding where his head cracked into his desk, still spitting threats and promises up at Mick’s back. And then he goes looking for the best place to start a blaze. He does it all an auto-pilot, barely remembers how or why he did it until he’s set his back to the burning building. And then he knows it was the smile on Thawne’s face, the one gone from Ray’s.

Whatever he decides to do about Ray’s skin, it’s a decision better made in a world that doesn’t have Thawne in it. He hopes that the man died in that fire, died slowly, that the next time anyone sees Thawne’s name in the paper it’ll be as an obituary. That way, he thinks, they’ll be free.

But they aren’t. The man’s words are still there, circling in his brain like sharks.

-

By the time Mick reaches the beach, he still doesn’t know what to do. The shoreline looks different than it had before, the sands shifted. He can’t recognise the place where Ray pulled him out of the sea, but the figure wandering up and down the strand is familiar. Every now and again, he’ll stop, lean down to pick something up, straighten, and then drop it again.

He doesn’t look around as Mick approaches. Maybe he doesn’t hear him. The sound of the waves on the shore is loud enough to cover the crunch of his footsteps. The ocean roars, and Mick wonders how it sounds to Ray. Whether it sounds like home, whether he even notices it, whether it sounds different when he puts on his sealskin.

The sealskin. Mick can feel the weight of it in his bag. He hadn’t realised that it would be so heavy. And he knows what he’s supposed to do with it. He’s supposed to give it to Ray, and then watch him vanish into the waves forever.

He doesn’t want to. Thawne was right, and he hates him all the more for it. But he can’t stop himself from coming up with excuses, explanations. The skin had been destroyed in the struggle, Mick had done his best, but Thawne was dead so at least Ray doesn’t have to be stuck with him anymore, and Mick’ll look after him. But those are the sort of lies that fall apart all too quickly. Ray would find the skin. He’s not certain Thawne is dead, wouldn’t put it past the man to turn up again with that same expression on his face.

He could tell Ray how he feels, offer to keep the skin, if that’s what he wants. Somewhere, he swears he can hear Snart telling him he’s gone soft, scoffing at the very idea of it. And would that even work? Does it count as stealing the skin if it’s agreed on?

He could just keep it anyway. Like Thawne said, Ray seemed to like being around him. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Mick had never claimed to be a good person.

Then Ray turns, the breeze catching at his hair, and with the sound of the sea and the white crash of the waves at his back, Mick can see that this is his home just as much as the Central City winters had been Snart’s.

Ray smiles at him, and it’s still all wrong, still strained.

Mick imagines the years stretching out ahead of them, with him looking at that every day. Knowing that he, even with the best of intentions, did exactly the same thing as the man who’d made Ray look so tired. And he can’t. His throat closes at the idea.

He digs the skin out of his bag and holds it out, wordlessly.

Ray doesn’t look at it. He’s looking at Mick’s hand, where he grabbed at the flame of Thawne’s lighter. It has an old scrap of bandage wrapped around it, so the salt air doesn’t make it smart any more than necessary.

“Are you OK?” Ray asks, reaching out for Mick’s fingers. “Did he hurt you?”

“Take the skin and go,” Mick says, his voice rough. He thrusts the skin at Ray, and it drops to the ground between them. Ray’s eyes flick down to it, and then back up to Mick.

“Mick?” he asks.

“Go.” Mick lets his tone turn even harder, until it’s something that’s almost a threat.

Ray stoops down, and picks it up. Mick notices then that he’s not wearing Thawne’s uniform anymore. Somewhere along the way, during the miles from Central City to this stretch of coastline, he’d found the time to change back into the clothes he’d been wearing in the museum. Back into Mick’s shirt.

Mick stands there, monolithic.

“Thank you,” Ray says, and he’s trying to meet Mick’s eyes. Mick stares through him. “You didn’t have to do this.”

Mick says nothing, and Ray nods, once, and turns to walk back towards the sea. He pauses at the edge of the waves, and looks back.

“You were always more than just a thief,” Ray tells him, and waits, just for a moment.

Some part of Mick’s head – he doesn’t listen to it enough to tell if it’s the bit that sounds like Snart – tells him to close the distance, kiss Ray at the edge of both their worlds, kiss him until they can’t feel the sound of the ocean or the cold of the water or the shift of the sand beneath their feet.

He doesn’t move. There’s no point in it. He’ll never see Ray again. Instead, he stands there and stares out to sea until Ray’s long gone and sky’s going dark, and the water’s turned flat like glass.

-

Part of Mick’s sure he drowned there, that day, caught in the undertow, even though he never went close enough to get his boots wet. He tells himself that he stays on the coast because he doesn’t know if Thawne made it out the fire, and it’s a good place to lay low until he can be certain. The town barely even as a name. And while that’s true enough, it’s also true that if Thawne’s alive and wants to find him, he’ll find him. If he wanted to be safer, he’d keep moving.

And yet, he’s still there, wandering the same strand that Ray had, sitting in a place that seems like it might be the one where they’d had that fire, watching in the harbour for seals. He learns more colours in the sky than ever existed in Central City, shakes more sand out of his clothes than he’s sure is actually on the beach, and intimidates more than one group of dog walkers (the dogs themselves adore him).

He tells himself every night that if he stands for long enough in the wind, it’ll hollow him out and he’ll be able to go home again. Just one more day. He’ll go in the morning.

It’s early evening when he hears the footsteps on the sand, and thinks that one of the dog walkers must finally have worked out that they could call the police on him for being a suspicious character in the process of loitering.

“You know, for a man who hates the ocean, you’re sure spending a lot of time on the beach.”

Mick turns, slowly. His turn trying not to break an illusion. But Ray’s real and standing behind him, still in Mick’s old shirt, still with far more collarbone showing than is decent, and he’s smiling again, like the sea had recharged whatever batteries Thawne had drained.

“Haircut,” he says, slowly. “Thawne told me you wouldn’t come back.”

“What?” Ray blinks, frowns as if checking his internal database to see if he’s broken a rule. “No?”

“He said selkies never came back to shore after getting their skins back.”

“No?” Ray says again. “I mean, a lot of them don’t in the stories, which makes a lot of sense, why would you want to go back on shore after something like that? But I just needed a few days to – needed some time. It’s not a rule, it’s just...” he shrugs. “Smart.”

“And you’re an idiot,” Mick surmises, and Ray grins.

“Guess so,” he says. Then his happiness drops away so abruptly that it almost has a sound. “Wait. If you thought I was never going to come back, what are you still doing here?”

There’s a long stretch of quiet after that, Ray waiting on his answer and Mick hoping that the silence will stretch long enough that Ray will say something and he won’t need to.

“Where else was I going to go?” Mick asks, finally, and the question, the admission in it, almost burns his tongue.

Ray leans in and kisses him like it’s the easiest thing in the world. It isn’t. Mick knows it isn’t. The easiest thing in the world is kissing him back. He tastes of brine, and where Mick’s fingers run through his hair, it’s tacky with salt.

“I was hoping,” Ray mumbles, barely moving back enough to get the words out. “That you might come with me. There’s still a few things up here I want to see, and–”

Mick doesn’t let him finish the sentence. Easier to answer with actions than with words, he’s always found. And so he acts, pulls Ray back in, one hand wrapped around the back of his neck.

He can still hear the sea, can still feel its presence. He’s aware of it, just as he’s aware of Ray’s heartbeat, of the pulse that he can feel against his wrist. A small part of his brain wonders whether or not he still hates it. The rest knows that it doesn’t matter. The sea doesn’t care whether or not Mick Rory hates it. It shifts, breathes, rages, goes on. And it’s already given him enough to know that he can do the same.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, and special thanks to anyone who leaves comments/kudos. I can also be found over at [my tumblr](http://yszarin.tumblr.com).


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